The Return of the Smear Bund

The tale
of the DC Five – the five Beltway bloggers at two prominent Democratic Washington
thinktanks who have been smacked down (and one fired) for being insufficiently
pro-Israel – is hardly a shock to those who know their history. But before we
get into that, a few details on what is only the latest chapter in the story
of how the War Party operates in this country.

The DC Five are Matt
Duss, Ali
Gharib, Eli
Clifton and Zaid
Jilani, bloggers at the Center for American Progress group blog, ThinkProgress,
and former AIPAC employee MJ
Rosenberg who currently writes for Media Matters. The Washington Post
details the charges against them:

“The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank closely aligned with the White House, is embroiled in a dispute with several major Jewish organizations over statements on Israel and charges that some center staffers have used anti-Semitic language to attack pro-Israel Americans.

“… Among the points of contention are several Twitter posts by one CAP writer on his personal account referring to “Israel-firsters.” Some experts say the phrase has its roots in the anti-Semitic charge that American Jews are more loyal to a foreign country. In another case, a second staffer described a U.S. senator as showing more fealty to the prime U.S. pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, than to his own constituents, replacing a standard identifier of party affiliation and state with “R-AIPAC” on his personal Twitter account. The first writer has since left the staff.”

The campaign to purge CAP was apparently launched
by one Josh Block,
an analyst at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), a Beltway thinktank whose
progressivism is largely measured by their enthusiasm as we “progress” to a
state of permanent war. This self-appointed arbiter of political correctness
has certain standards we all had better abide by, as he told Politico:

“As a progressive Democrat, I am convinced that on issues as important as the US-Israel alliance and the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program, there is no room for uncivil discourse or name calling, like ‘Israel Firster or ‘Likudnik’, and policy or political rhetoric that is hostile to Israel, or suggests that Iran has no nuclear weapons program, has no place in the mainstream Democratic party discourse. I also believe that when it occurs, progressive institutions, have a responsibility not to tolerate such speech or arguments.”

So let’s get this straight: there is “no room” among those engaging in “civil
discourse” to in any way cast
doubt on the proposition that Iran has an active nuclear weapons program:
to even suggest such a thing is prima facie proof of “anti-Semitism.”

Glenn Greenwald tears this nonsense to pieces here: it’s an admirable piece, rich with detail and electric with indignation, but I have to say I can’t quite get as exercised by all this as Glenn does. After all, smearing opponents of whatever war we’re currently engaged in as “anti-Semites” is hardly a new phenomenon.

Indeed, practically every major war we’ve fought since World War II has witnessed
identical accusations hurled at anti-interventionists. Before, during, and even
after World War II, opponents
of US intervention in the European war were routinely smeared as proponents
of Nazism. The antiwar writer and former New Republic columnist John
T. Flynn detected a pattern in the activities of the pro-war groups, which
were well-funded and relentless: he called them the “Smear
Bund” because they specialized in tarring war opponents with the Nazi brush.
Right up to today, the biggest antiwar movement in American history – the America
First Committee, which had a membership of 800,000 – and which opposed US
entry into World War II is widely considered to have been a pro-Nazi anti-Semitic
organization, a lie that has long outlived its pro-Communist and pro-British
perpetrators.

While opponents of the Korean “police
action” and the Vietnam disaster were
regularly denounced as pro-Communists and “fellow travelers,” the “anti-Semite”
canard gained new currency in the run-up to the
first Gulf War. When Patrick J. Buchanan attributed the beating of war drums
to “Israel’s amen corner,” he was attacked
by both the right and the left as a hate criminal for daring to point out what
was patently true: that the pro-Israel lobby in the US was pushing hard for
“regime change” in Iraq. The same “Israel first” crowd was leading
the charge in the months prior to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, only
this time the “anti-Semitic” charge was pushed even harder. Andrew Sullivan
claimedThe
Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion was being peddled at antiwar demonstrations.
As fanatically pro-Israel neoconservatives pushed their war agenda, in part,
to “ensure Israel’s position,” as Gen. Anthony Zinni put
it, the War Party used the “anti-Semitism” charge as a toxic meme to discredit
war opponents.

The Post piece singles out the phrase “Israel-firsters” and a blog
post by Eli Clifton entitled “AIPAC’s
Iran Strategy on Sanctions Mirrors Mimics Run-Up to Iraq War Tactics” as
indicative of the crimes of the DC Five. Attacking a statement from more than
90 US Senators calling for draconian sanctions to be placed on Iraq’s central
bank, and the subsequent hailing of this by AIPAC, Clifton noted that such a
move would be in itself an act of war:

“But that doesn’t seem to bother AIPAC. Indeed, they’ve been down this sanctions road once before before the invasion of Iraq. In June, Robert Dreyfuss interviewed former AIPAC senior Iran analyst Keith Weissman who offered details of how its allies in the Bush administration pushed the allegation that Saddam Hussein was in league with al Qaeda.”

Let’s stop here, for station identification: Weissman,
formerly AIPAC’s top Iran analyst, was indicted
along with AIPAC’s top lobbyist, Steve
Rosen, for committing espionage
against the United States for the benefit of Israel. The duo was busted after
not one but two
FBI
raids on AIPAC’s posh Washington headquarters. However, the case ground
to a halt when the defense, in effect, greymailed
the government into dropping legal proceedings by insisting on the release
of highly classified information as part and parcel of their clients getting
a “fair trial.” As it was, there was no
trial, and neither Rosen nor Weissman was ever cleared of the charges. The
Rosen-Weissman tag team had been milking Pentagon analyst Larry
Franklin for all the classified information they could lay their hands on,
and funneling it to Israeli government officials: when the FBI came to Franklin’s
door, they found a treasure
trove of top secret documents in his home going back many years. Sneaking
around Washington, the traitorous trio met on dark street corners and held meetings
in out of the way restaurants, changing venues regularly for fear of being followed.
They were caught anyway, and the FBI – having snagged and “turned” Franklin
first – lured the conspirators into a well-laid trap, which was sprung just
as the two AIPAC officials thought they were reeling in a really big fish –
top secret information promised them by Franklin, who was wearing a wire.

“’Weissman says that Iran was alarmed at the possibility that the United
States might engage in overt and covert efforts to instigate opposition inside
Iran. He says that many in AIPAC, especially among its lay leadership and biggest
donors, strongly backed regime change in Iran. ‘That was what Larry [Franklin]
and his friends wanted,’ he says. ‘It included lots of different parts, like
broadcasts, giving money to groups that would conduct sabotage, it included
bringing the Mojahedin[-e Khalgh], bringing them out of Iraq and letting them
go back to Iran to carry out missions for the United States. Harold
Rhode backed this…. There were all these guys, Michael
Ledeen, ‘Next stop Tehran, next stop Damascus.’”

Clifton then goes on to note: “Indeed, as shown in the AIPAC press release, Iran is now the target of similar sanctions and bellicose rhetoric similar to those that targeted Iraq in the late 1990s and early 2000s.” He also notes AIPAC’s cozy relationship with the Saudis, saying they welcomed sanctions on Iranian oil because it would drive up the price of the Kingdom’s petroleum exports. Weissman recalls:

“Prince Bandar used to send us messages. I used to meet with Adel al-Jubeir a couple times a year. Adel used to joke that if we could force an American embargo on Iranian oil, he’d buy us all Mercedes! Because Saudi [Arabia] would have had the excess capacity to make up for Iran at that time.”

Here we have someone who spied on the US on behalf of Israel giving
us the inside scoop on the Israel Lobby’s machinations around the issue of war
with Iran. What could be clearer than the testimony of this veteran fifth columnist,
who — for whatever reason — has come clean about Israel’s campaign to drag
us into war with Iran? This is the real reason for the Israel Lobby’s phony
outrage at CAP and its heavy-handed tactics of suppression. They don’t want
the American people to know that the Lobby is doing everything
in its power to provoke war with Iran – a natural function of its role as the
Israeli government’s Washington mouthpiece. Clifton’s citing of Weissman hit
a particularly sensitive spot, and that’s no doubt what had the Lobby howling:
even mentioning Israel’s extensive covert activities in the US, including aggressive
technology
theft as well as traditional spying, is considered prima facie evidence
of “anti-Semitism” by the Lobby.

Oh, but don’tcha know it’s a hate crime to even use the term “Israel-firster?
It is because Eli Lake says so: You see, Eli
— prodigy
that he is— has traced the terminological origins of this phrase, and discovered
that Willis Carto,
nut-job extraordinaire, was supposedly the first to use it. So even if you’ve
never heard of Carto, and are as Jewish as M.J. Rosenberg, you’re still
an “anti-Semite” if you use it. (Naturally Jamie
Kirchick, self-proclaimed “homosexual
warrior” and lately an “analyst” at the ultra-Likudnik Foundation for the
Defense of Democracies, re-tweeted Lake’s “discovery.”)

We aren’t allowed to say Iran gave up its nuclear program in 2003, just like
the US intelligence community said in its National
Intelligence Estimate on the subject (don’t you know the CIA is full of
“anti-Semites”?): we aren’t allowed to say that people who passed classified
data to Israeli officials are “Israel-firsters,” not even if they are named
Jonathan Pollard.
The reason is because these are “toxic” themes which are” corrosive and unacceptable,”
according to Rabbi
Abraham Cooper, associate director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Abraham
Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, denounced the writings
of the DC Five as “anti-Semitic and borderline anti-Semitic.” Jason Isaacson,
of the American Jewish Committee, averred:

“For any serious policy center there are certain lines of fairness and objectivity and good sense that should not be crossed, and yet, disturbingly, those lines have regularly been crossed.”

You’re not Serious if you fail to give Israel and its American partisans a
free pass: once you “cross the line,” you’re relegated to the fever swamps of
“anti-Semitism” and “extremism” – oh, and by way, the very
real extremism of fanatic Zionists is also never to be mentioned
by Serious People. Giving this regime of strict thought control an academic
imprimatur, the Post article cites one Jeffrey Herf, a historian at
the University of Maryland, “who has published books on anti-Semitism” (impressive!)
and who says:

“The suggestion of Jewish ‘dual loyalty,’ along with the accusation that
AIPAC was pushing for war with Iran, hearkened back to the early days of World
War II, when certain people accused the U.S. government of entering the war
as a response to powerful Jewish interests. ‘This kind of nonsense is all over
the place on the Internet,’ Herf said. ‘The fact that some of this is showing
up on the Center for American Progress Web site makes it important.’”

Well then, that settles it: we have a college professor who
says poor little Israel is being “singled out” for “unfair” and quite possibly
bigoted criticism, and is subjected (by bigots) to a standard not applied to
other countries. We have Josh
Block, who thinks anyone doubting the “evidence” for Iran’s alleged nuke
program is a Hitlerite; Abe Foxman, who sees anti-Semites everywhere;
and last, but hardly least, Jamie
Kirchick, who used to work for – and regularly defend – an editor who routinely
compared Arabs to “animals.”
All these sterling examples of human virtue and politically correct righteousness
are telling the White House it’s time for a purge at the Center for American
Progress. And, guess what – they are getting their wish.

The DC Five have been muzzled: CAP management has clamped down on the ThinkProgress
blog. You’ll find no more talk of “Israel-firsters” there – because the
Israel-firsters don’t want to be identified as such. Being foreign agents, they
prefer to operate under cover of night: but they’ll gladly execute their enemies
in broad daylight, if need be, in order to make an example.

This they have certainly done in the case of the DC Five: they’ve shown that
any thinktank close to the White House must be “purified” of elements whose
loyalty to the “special relationship” is in doubt. The White House, according
to the Post, was horrified by the reports from the complainers, and
no doubt laid down the law to CAP. The Post reports Ken Gude, chief
of staff and vice president for CAP, saying:

“We have a zero-tolerance policy for racism, sexism, anti-Semitism or any
form of discrimination,” Gude wrote. He said CAP has adopted a new policy requiring
staffers to adhere to professional standards on Twitter. In addition, Zaid Jilani,
the author of the ‘Israel-firster’ tweets, apologized and left CAP’s staff in
recent days to take another job. Jilani could not be reached for comment.”

“Professional standards” = no criticism of Israel. That’s the Washington thinktank rule, and you break it at your peril.

For the Smear Bund, it’s
always 1939, and the Eternal Enemy is always “Hitler,” or an unreasonable
facsimile thereof. If you oppose their war agenda, then you’re an “anti-Semite,”
plain and simple. They been using these tactics for many years– even bending
the language to suit their propagandistic purposes.

Where else do you think the term “isolationist” came from? “Anti-Semitism”
used to mean hatred of Jews per se, for being Jews: today it has morphed
into “disproportionate criticism” of Israel. If you don’t denounce every violent
act ever perpetrated by Arabs in the same breath you critique Israel’s
policy of subjecting Palestinians to conditions of helotry, then you’re
spreading “hatred,” according
to the learned Prof. Herf. Whether this means that every criticism of, say,
Saddam Hussein’s atrocities ought to have been accompanied by denunciations
of war crimes perpetrated by Americans, I’ll leave that as an open question:
somehow, however, I suspect that isn’t what Prof. Herf means.

The Smear Bund has always been with us, and it will continue to be there, looking over our shoulder and parsing our words for thought-crimes, unto eternity. Indeed, I expect to hear from them shortly that anyone who advocates peace, under any circumstances, is an “anti-Semite” and a “conspiracy theorist” who deserves to be banished to intellectual Coventry for their crimes.

As we approach a state
of war with Iran, this tired old accusation is going to be hauled out and
pushed with renewed zeal. The Isra-bots
will “argue” that since Iran represents an “existential
threat” to Israel’s very existence, anyone who opposes a war with Tehran
is calling for a replay of the Holocaust. If you’re for peace, and see no vital
US interest in going to war with Iran, well then you’re a “Holocaust-denier.”
And, hey, didn’t Willis Carto “invent” the term “Israel-firster”? Why, how dare
you advocate a policy of non-intervention – what are you, some kind of Nazi?
When the price of oil quadruples as US warplanes bomb Tehran, don’t even think
of complaining – unless you want to be tagged as an “anti-Semite.” And if you’re
caught wondering what we are doing fighting Israel’s
wars, at great cost to our own interests – well then, don’t even think about
working for the Center for American Progress, or, indeed, any “serious” thinktank.

Israel’s lobby in the US is reflexively defensive, and covertly authoritarian: they can’t afford to have an open discussion of our “special relationship” with Israel — and Israel’s sick relationship with its Arab helots – and so must resort to silencing their opponents. The case of the DC Five is meant to sow fear among the policy analysts and thinktankers who inhabit the Washington Beltway: “do not cross the line,” they are telling them – and the closer we get to war with Iran, the faster the boundaries of the impermissible are growing. There is a method to this madness: it is a preemptive strike aimed at opponents of US intervention, and on the left as well as the right it is turning out to be quite effective.

Author: Justin Raimondo

Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].
View all posts by Justin Raimondo